A Blog for The Thinking Muslim

I started blogging a few years ago and it has grown a lot since those initial years. I remember when I first started this blog, I would barely get any views but now I am hitting over a thousand views a month and still growing! This is without marketing or anything. It’s all organic traffic coming mainly from Google. Take a look at the bar graph below of my traffic for the past few years. As you can see, it is consistently growing and I am hoping to cross 200,000 views this year. The thing you have to remember about…

The first thing to do when a student wants to study Hanbali fiqh in a serious manner is to find a teacher. There is no way getting around this condition. It does not matter how many books, commentaries, or lectures you listen to, if you are not engaging with the texts of the school directly with a teacher to guide you through them, then there is a strong possibility of making serious flaws and having numerous misunderstandings. If you do not know where to find one in your area, then reach out to groups like المدرسة الحنبلية. They offer inexpensive…

What follows is a very easy step by step process on how to do Hajj prepared by Sh. Muhammad Alshareef. You can also download a brochure style one page double sided printable PDF version of the guide below by clicking here. My family used this very guide to do our very first Hajj. It was so helpful that we needed little to no supervision during the transition between the different rites. We knew exactly what to do and what was happening next. At one point other people at Hajj were coming up to us and asking for help when they became confused. I am…

The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is reported to have said, “The strong believer is better and more beloved to Allah than the weak believer, although both are good. Strive for that which will benefit you, seek the help of Allah, and do not feel helpless” (Ibn Majah). One of the reasons that good health is emphasized in our religion is because it helps us better perform worship and good deeds. The person who is healthy and strong is able to do more good than a person who is weak. When a person has good health, he/she should not waste it in…

Investing in the stock market, regardless of whether it be a domestic company or a multinational corporation and regardless of it being the company in which one works, is only permissible given the following guidelines: One must avoid investing in industries that are forbidden or doubtful, such as commercial banks that deal in interest, government bonds, insurance companies, pornography, companies that sell or produce tobacco or alcohol, gambling casinos, nightclubs, companies that sell forbidden food items or drugs and the like. For those scholars who allow investing in “mixed companies” (those companies that produce a mixture of permissible and impermissible…

It is important to study the seerah (prophet’s life) from beginning to end to properly understand the context and why and how things happened the way they did. Unfortunately, it seems many Muslims have either never studied his life or are only familiar with cherry picked snippets of his life to suit certain agendas and preconceived conclusions by completely abandoning the context. Here are a few of my favorites that I have actually read and liked in the English language. You can find them all on Amazon. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings – This…

When I was studying Islamic inheritance law, the chart below came to be really handy. I am sharing it here now for others to benefit from it. It is very easy to follow if you’ve studied Islamic inheritance law before. Click on the chart to download it as an image file.